It all happens here in Wales folks, for here in the beautiful Pembrokeshire National Park where as some may already know, athletes from around the world are gathering to compete in the Internationally acclaimed Ironman Event.

This competition is known as the ‘Ironman – Wales’.

The competition will be on the 11th September 2011 here in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in just 4 days time and I can assure all the competitors,  their teams and all visitors will receive the warmest of welcomes from the Welsh peoples as always.

View from The Ridgeway, Penally

Around 1500 athletes will be taking part in this tough Triathlon,
which covers many gruelling miles
of cycling, running and ocean swimming.

Check out the website at http://www.ironmanwales.com

Just think about their constant concern with time and timing, using every second with utmost thought and care to help them get the best from there day, time and effort to achieve results, which seem to others to be unobtainable. Well may the best Ironman win, but then everyone of them is a winner really.

Incidentally, all the beaches in Wales are ‘Blue Flagged’.

There are many many things to see and enjoy here in our wonderful
Pembrokeshire National Park, just check it out on your computer.

So come on down and enjoy yourselves!
See you here.

Merv.

Carew Castle - Pembrokeshire

Here’s a couple of photographs I took on the morning the local all-weather RNLI Lifeboat, and inshore lifeboat both stationed at Tenby, had rescued some folk out at sea, bringing them and their small craft safely back into Saundersfoot Harbour here in Pembrokeshire.

Tenby Lifeboat Lands Survivors onto Saundersfoot Harbour Quayside

Tenby All-weather Lifeboat & Inshore Lifeboat Returning to Base after another successful rescue

Tenby's Lifeboats going home Quick Time to be ready for any new emergency

You may not be too concerned about global warming – okay, you might be good at recycling and turning off everything before you go to bed at the end of the day – but you almost certainly will be concerned about the cost of fuel and how it’s affecting your monthly budget. Did you see that documentary on the television recently, talking about oil and how we are gradually running out of it? All kinds of mayhem and civil war will erupt when that happens, so they say and we really need to look for alternative sources, right now. You may well have heard about biodiesel, but not a great deal. What you should know is that it is a viable and economical alternative source of fuel and it’s something that you can manufacture yourself, at home.

Biodiesel is carbon neutral and as such does not contribute to global warming and pollution of our cities. It’s relatively easy and quite simple to make yourself, it is non-toxic and you can make it from organic vegetable oil or animal fats. You may not be afraid to roll up your sleeves and get involved in a new project, especially if it’s something that’s generally good for our environment and particularly good for your pocketbook too. Maybe it’s time for you to take a biodiesel 101 class?

Enter Mervyn Rees, the author of the revealing Book on Biodiesel, now available for download directly to your Amazon Kindle. Available in Paper Back Versions and a Kindle Version. This book will quench your thirst for information about the extraordinary potential of biodiesel, will tell you why it is such a palatable alternative, how it’s becoming much more popular around the world and how you can get your own slice of the action.

You will learn that it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of skill, nor a very complex technique to manufacture this product right in your own home and you will also find out what equipment you require and the materials necessary to manufacture biodiesel from scratch. You don’t have to be a chemist and merely have to be able to follow instructions, handling the necessary chemicals carefully in order to produce your first batch of this amazing fuel.

There’s a lot of confusing information out there and a number of naysayers, who simply do not have all the information and are not aware of the tremendous potential represented by biodiesel. You owe it to yourself to find out what is true and what is not about the fuel, the availability of ingredients, the costs associated with its production and the many positive environmental effects and financial benefits waiting for you and your family’s finances.

Rees is well known in this field and was one of the first to trumpet the benefits associated with biodiesel. He has produced a very readable, informative and exciting book which is sure to stoke your interest. For once, take control of an important element of your life by finding out whether you, too, can become a new world biodieseler.

In what is the first solution of its kind, virtual assistant-extraordinaire Michelle Dale is launching a unique training certification programme for virtual assistants, worldwide. Michelle, who has long been recognised as one of the leaders in her field, has established this training programme in recognition of the growing interest in virtual assistance over recent years. Furthermore, to celebrate the launch of the programme, five apprentice spots will be made available to lucky applicants, each valued at $2997.

Michelle is the CEO of Virtual Miss Friday, a leading VA service provider and recognises that there is a dearth of information available to newcomers in this business. She has put together a cutting edge programme and training course that is suitable for both aspiring and junior virtual assistants. The course draws heavily on Michelle’s experience and her rise to prominence in this industry and it seeks to impart this knowledge and breadth of awareness to programme members.

“I tell it exactly like it is, I don’t mince my words and you will have the full benefit of my honesty and personal experience,” reminds Michelle, who has operated a virtual assistance business from a number of different countries around the world. She has expanded and established her business through a lot of adversity and has developed some creative and unique ways to make the company successful. She promises to impart her passion for the industry and to provide a great deal of collateral and assistance to those starting off their journey.

Participants will have the benefit of working with an established support team and the resources behind Michelle’s existing VA business and will never be expected to “go it alone.” The state-of-the-art course is based on an intuitive interface and has a number of valuable, additional bonuses to help students get going and to hit the ground running.

VirtualAssistant-Live.com is intended to be the future of virtual assistance training. More and more organisations are looking to outsource to virtual assistants in our new economy and the opportunities for those who are starting off in this industry are indeed considerable.

In order to apply for the FREE Apprenticeships, would-be virtual assistants are invited to visit the website at http://virtualassistant-live.com/the-va-apprentice/ and leave some appropriate comments, in order to convince Michelle that they are suitable for the apprenticeship.

About VirtualAssistant-Live, Virtual Miss Friday and Michelle Dale

VirtualAssistant-Live is hosted by Michelle Dale and is intended to be a source of matter-of-fact advice and inspiration for virtual assistants around the world. The site is a direct offshoot of the successful Virtual Miss Friday website, which has been established for many years as one of the preeminent virtual assistance solutions available. Michelle draws on her extensive experience in the corporate environment to provide a network of services and solutions for clients of Virtual Miss Friday. An adventurer at heart, she has established her VA businesses whilst travelling as a Digital Nomad living in countries throughout the Middle East and Europe – so far…

Without a sense of what time management is all about, you cannot hope to be truly productive in your life in general, let alone within your moneymaking endeavours. We all start out with the same amount of hours in a given day and the same opportunity to be efficient and effective. Many of us need help to truly focus though, and this is where revolutionary products such as Click Clock, can really come into their own.

This cutting-edge software brings together two significant elements, allowing you to focus on the actions that you need to accomplish, while establishing “time boxes” or individual timers, specific to these actions. Click Clock is truly intuitive, and the software will walk you, step-by-step, through the actions that you need to take to seize control over your time management.

To give you a good idea of just how helpful this software is and how it is a joy to work with, check out its functions. You can also personalise the software to make it user-friendly and to fit in with your theme, selecting background colours, or using a custom-made background or photograph that you have stored on your computer, or elsewhere. Once you have configured your personal version of Click Clock, and understood just how versatile it really is, get ready to enter the world of productivity, as this flexible software takes you by the hand!

If you have not yet checked out this amazing tool, here is some great news. Click Clock is now accessible as an online version too! Available at just $7.95 a month, to take advantage of this offer, Click Here.

Click Clock and You’re Done!

Looking to the future.

Hey, it’s wonderful to see British Airways getting a biodiesel fuel policy plan together in such a large and positive way and helping the environment.

I have heard that this fantastic development comes with benefits of renewable energy by building a ‘Jet Fuel Plant’ in East London which will in fact bring new employment to around 1,200 people.
It is reported that there are 4 new development sites for this project, which is hoped will pass through the planning stages and gain consent very quickly, so that construction work can start early in 2011.

Apparently the construction will be in partnership with the US renewable energy company, the ‘Solena Group’, who’s head office is located in Washington, DC.

Making biodiesel fuel will be from the conversion of millions of tons of waste materials, such as forestry, agricultural and food, which would have otherwise gone to landfill sites. Initially half a million tons a year, which they say will produce about 15 to 16 million gallons of environmentally safe biodiesel jet fuel which is fantastic news for helping the environment and especially for those living and working in and around London.
Just think of the knock on effects as others too, will say, “Why not me too?”

With the horrendous price of fuel constantly going up and up for the foreseeable future, and the huge unsustainable costs of imports doing nothing for our balance of payments etc, as a nation producing Billions of tons of waste annually, we are throwing away a vast fortune.
So why not instead, cut our greenhouse gas emissions and our national debt by our turning waste mountains, which when manipulated is turned into a slurry of carbons and technically managed into a usable form which will produce natural gas, biodiesel and fertilizers; and get on with building these sort of systems right around the country?
Naturally once the system starts producing; it will be able to manufacture its own electricity therefore in and of itself being an environmentally friendly full circle.

So come on UK, let’s put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Great Britain’, get stuck in, and get cracking with more of these schemes for homemade biodiesel fuel, natural gas and fertilizers to regenerate industries and our soils, plus making electricity as ways to save electricity , from our own constantly renewable energy source.

Now all this has to be real cool!
Ooop’s nearly a Merv rant !

Merv’s software launch imminent!
It  needed some first class time management to get through all the many exciting and varied tests, so as to delivery you the best blooming software at a price everyone can afford as it literally becomes self financing within hours of putting it into use!
Just a little more time for perfection – it really is worth waiting for.

Watch this space!

What has today’s space shuttle launch, got to do with renewable energy, helping the environment or saving electricity? Well let’s think about it.

Today they have taken up what I think is the last piece of the International Space Station construction, i.e. one very large bay window for the astronauts relaxation lounge! I am really looking forward to hopefully seeing their space photographs in the near future.

Here's that window you ordered!

So that probably means new technology, and sooner or later that generally filters down to us mere mortals here on Earth thereby helping the environment.

With the extreme cold temperature of space it just has to be the most efficient piece of glazing in or out of this world, right! So that must save on power probably in the form of electricity, which must come from some whiz of a power source on their celestial home, giving the benefits of renewable energy.

Then there are the interesting experiments with regards, weightlessness and the problems that may be caused by prolonged weightlessness, such as when colonizing  the moon or sending man to Mars where time management demands meaningful care of all activities.

So just like you and me, they need to exercise to keep flesh and bone in tiptop condition, and hence some of the experiments I believe are to find out how they can meaningfully exercise on a treadmill, which incidentally, was also taken up with them today.

Somehow they will have to tie them on to it to stop them floating away, but it still has to be in such away so as for them to be able to give equal and opposite force on the machine which enables them to move freely, and  at the same time hold down firm enough  for them to be able to ‘feel’ weight’ of their bodies as they pound the treadmill to give the necessary internal biological responses that does such things as keeping the bones and muscles strong, and the necessary responses to their internal mechanisms for rejuvenating the blood cells amongst other things.

It was very heartening to see them all launch safely, and I’m sure we all wish all astronauts bon-voyage, a successful mission, and safe return to mother Earth.

Enjoy your day,

Merv.

We seem so engrossed as we run in place, just to make ends meet, that we are not capable of standing back and looking at the bigger picture anymore. Why are we so grossly inefficient at the way that we run our lives? This must be a consequence of many years of relatively good times, when we didn’t need to worry about the sheer amount of petrol that our cars used, or the fact that we have become completely reliant our cars just to exist these days. A recession was something that we could barely remember or if we were young enough, we read about it in economics books. Perhaps it was time for a wake-up call, but time or not we have certainly received one.

We can see that we can no longer rely on mechanical energy to help us to do absolutely everything. Our energy inefficiency has led to gross amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and damage to our environment and we need to change now. We talk a good story about the benefits of renewable energy, but we are not helping the environment by diverting funds away from the research and development needed to actually make these options work for us.

This, “The Great Recession,” as it has become known, has now shown us how vulnerable we are to a downturn and how we all have little to fall back on in hard times. As such, we must be efficient in everything we do and this definitely includes energy use. We need to learn to turn things off, to think of alternatives and not to opt for the path of least resistance. We must review our transportation habits and not clog the roads with single occupant vehicles each and every day as we go back and forth to work.

At home or in the office, think of ways to save electricity and if you are the decision-maker, you must be the one to take action. Insist that your family turns off all the lights, turn up the thermostats by a notch and don’t allow them to be altered, make sure that all family members wash clothes at the same time and not individually and generally be a better keeper of the space that you occupy.

As we know, we cannot rely on our politicians to work quickly enough. Few seem to doubt the validity of those environmental claims, but political agendas are still getting in the way of making any headway. Just look at what failed to come out of that summit of “leaders” in Copenhagen – inaction once again.

We don’t have to wait around for politicians to try and force big business to solve these issues. If we all do our own bit, we can save ourselves money by steadily reducing our energy use and our own carbon footprints every day, and although we can’t get this all done by ourselves, we can achieve real results if we work together. ‘People Power’ really can achieve this quite easily, after all, there are billions of us, so let’s just do it – start right now!